The Benefits of Introspection

Somehow, another month is on its way out, and I am almost a year into living in the Midwest.

There's something so...homespun and small-town charming about it all that I can't quite wrap my head around. I've never lived in a place like this before, and I don't know if I will stay here, but I can't deny it has captured my narrow little mind and shown me all sorts of new things I will never forget.

I've never before had the urge to garden or plant, but now I'm growing three little herbs in a pot (baby steps) and it's truly a challenge not to be proud of myself (though I specifically picked ones I knew would basically live no matter what I did) that they're thriving. The fireflies are coming out slowly now, and I've been enchanted by them too. If there weren't so many darn mosquitoes-that-apparently-don't-give-a-shit-how-much-bug-spray-I've-doused-myself-in, I would just sit outside and watch them all evening.

On the other not-pleasant-at-all hand, N and I recently encountered a person laying at the side of a road near his house recently. He was mostly covered by the tall grass and shrubs, and we only noticed because his leg was about a quarter of the way into the very small road. We looked at each other in a moment of panic, clearly both thinking "Uh shit is he dead? Should we go check? Should we call someone? What do we do?!!!" We did go check, and thank goodness it appeared that he was breathing normally and just asleep. We figured he wasn't hurting anyone so we should just leave him alone and he had disappeared within an hour or so.
A while back N linked me to this seminal post on procrastination by Tim Urban and naturally, as I was putting off writing an SOP (oh my god, so. boring.), I read the whole post and every subsequent procrastination post linked to it. To my slight surprise, I discovered something very important. I fall into the "Successtinator" category where I happen to have a job that makes me feel fulfilled because I have many deadlines that require me to get things done and doing a bunch of menial tasks gives me the false impression of having achieved things, but in reality, my house just periodically gets VERY clean, and that is not an achievement to be proud of in the long run.

Procrastinators like me spend very little time in what Urban calls Quadrant Two: Important but not Urgent. He describes this as the quadrant of true fulfillment through activities undertaken for personal improvement (i.e. hobbies that are true rather than a quick way to ignore other things) and Successtinators spend a bunch of time doing other stuff and telling themselves they're doing really well while putting off the stuff in this section. This blog was started as something of a true hobby for personal fulfillment. I was Quadrant Two-ing hard for a little while, and then all of a sudden my interest waned and suddenly I was not blogging because it made me feel fulfilled, but because I hated to break the commitment I had made. It is nice (albeit a bit eerie) to have someone explain perfectly down to the T the way your procrastinator brain works, and I am excited to take this new awareness and turn it into action...I hope.
I am nearing the end of my first week of what I'm calling my food-discipline, caloric-deficit (FDCD) diet. This is pretty basic and just means I've planned all my meals around creating a certain amount of caloric deficit, while also accounting for the fact that I need to eat like 6 times a day to stave off hunger. To be on the safe side (because Jesus, it is hard to estimate calories), I have underestimated my basal metabolic rate, and overestimated the amount of calories things contain when I can't count them exactly. I have factored in exercise for about 2-3 days a week (though I have been reasonably disciplined as of late and am averaging about 4 days/week of moderate exercise the last couple months). We shall see how long this lasts. Hopefully, if nothing else, I will be exhaustively aware of how much crap I normally put in my body. All this being said, discipline sucks and I desperately want to go back to the land of not giving a fuck. Eyes on the prize, Mugdha...
Lastly, I was thrilled to rise today to the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. Think what you might, but you cannot deny that love has truly won today. And if you haven't read the end of Justice Kennedy's description of the ruling, you truly should. What a time to be alive!

Happy weekend, all!

Blustery Day

I was going to write something about how it is rather blustery (read: loudly and terrifyingly windy) outside today, because hey! I watched Winnie the Pooh as a kid, and I sure know some of you did, so this will be a good bonding moment. So then I Googled the clip from the movie that I was looking for and it turns out I'd totally forgotten the little song Pooh sings.

Oh the wind is lashing lustily
And the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily
So it's rather safe to say

That it seems that it may turn out to be
It feels that it will undoubtedly
It looks like a rather blustery day

Can someone tell me was lustily lashing winds are? Or thrashing thrustily trees? Those things all sound like they came from bad fanfiction (trind shippers, get at me), not from a cutesy little movie about stuffed animals. Disney haters and overzealous parents (have those circles completely overlapped yet??) would be all up on this, right? I could write my junior year of high school paper on this and would probably hate Baudrillard just as much coming out of it! This is outrageous! Actually, since I could literally care no less about hidden messages in Disney movies, I mostly just find it  amusing to imagine lusty winds and thrusty trees. You're welcome.
For reference:
  Though, I am hoping my attitude doesn't bring down the tornado we are on watch for and kill us all.

Starting 2013

To start off the new year, I went skiing! Skiing is my favorite winter activity and every year I beg my family and friends to go and sometimes they acquiesce. This was my first in nearly 3 years and it was sunny and warm and beautiful, and I could not imagine a better way to begin 2013.

I keep looking at this serene picture, though, and being reminded of horizons and the awesome (but also stressful) things I have coming up this year. These aren't resolutions, per se, but in 2013, I'm going to:

• Become EMT Certified
• Complete 8 weeks of public health fieldwork
• Begin my Masters thesis
• Take the MCAT again
• Apply to medical school

If I keep the horizon in perspective (read: when it's 1 am and I want to go to bed instead of finishing that one last reading), I could be setting up for a truly amazing year, and that is good motivation.

Break!

There's just nothing in the world like the majesty of an Arizona sunset. I miss driving into these so much when I'm not home. The reds and oranges and pinks blending with our rare clouds and silhouetted mountains stops my heart every time I drive down this open road. I'm convinced that nowhere else compares. Anyway, I am home for the holidays, eagerly anticipating the visit of my aunt, uncle and two little cousins (and cleaning accordingly), excited to be in temperate weather through this cold month, and looking forward to seeing old friends in the city that will always be home. Hope you all are doing something fun for the holidays!

A Bit More Anandwan

Though I'm in Pune now, and leaving back for America in 3 days, I thought I'd share a little more of Anandwan playtime, since I'm still lacking the large majority of the pictures from worktime.
All the leprosy patients are rehabilitated by learning a vocation to help restore their dignity and self-worth. One such vocation is crafting. A patient had made this model of a dog out of cigarette cartons.
We spent a day at Somnath, a satellite project of Anandwan, which is even more remote and has a lot of monkeys nearby! This one had a little baby with it!
Somnath houses two leopards. One was born there, is a sweetheart, and lets the village kids ride it. This is the other one....that ate two people.
Ending with a little picture of our Project RISHI shirts. Eventually...eventually...the rest of the pictures and stories and stuff will come. Promise!

Adventure Sunday

It's my second to last day at SEARCH today, and I feel like I have so much to say and reflect upon and stuff, but I really wanted this to be a whole post about our trip to an 8th century temple last Sunday, so the rest will have to wait.



Some of the carvings in this temple. Old Indian temples...are rife with these. Impressive for people who still can't figure out how to electrify the country regularly, you know?



I guess the place was supposed to be built in another town, but was moved here when that didn't work out. Now, it's right on a river. One of the few that flows south to north in India, to which I would say, A+ location change. The river wasn't all the way full because rainy season is just starting but that led to some even more fun times.



We decided to take these teeeny tiny, sketchy little boats to the other bank (we're talking there was water pouring into the bottom sketchy), where we proceeded to frolick and play tag and just be generally childish because it was sandy and empty...



...And then it poured in true Indian monsoon fashion where we saw it coming from down the river. We'd been planning to only stay for like half an hour, but instead we ended up stranded on the other side for two-and-a-half in the pouring rain. My shoes got wet so I just...took them off and barefooted it for the next four hours....which was interesting.



And then on the way back we stopped in town for some food (my first meat in FOUR weeks!), bottle coke, ice cream, and candy, and headed back to our quiet little Shodhgram in the woods for a much-needed, long, hot bath, some dinner, and a good night's sleep.

My internet will be...worse...starting Friday, so maybe if I get a chance to post in the next two weeks, I'll post something short about that leg of the trip, but chances aren't looking good.

Adventure Picture-Post Pt. 2

It's been a while, and sadly my time at SEARCH is almost up (only 1 more week), but here are a few more pictures of the adventures I've been having!



We stayed for 2 days in one of the extremely rural villages that SEARCH serves. No running water, sketchy roofs, generally poor, and still some of the most hospitable people I've met. Such a good experience!



The lovely village health worker we stayed with (in the middle)! Anjana-bai is from the village we stayed at but she's been working with SEARCH for about 18 years. She was so excited that our group could speak Marathi (because most of her visitors speak Hindi or English, neither of which she knows very well) that she did not stop talking the whole time we were there! The best story she told was about her first time on a plane and how she thought that someone was watching her and turning the faucet on when she brought her hands near the automatic-sensor sink. Totally cool to hear about something like that, which I take for granted all the time, from another perspective.



If there is one thing I loooove about here it's sunset and night time. I'd never seen fireflies before in my life (and obviously they are hard to capture on camera), but there are TONS here! They look like little sparkling stars and I seriously cannot get enough of them.



We found this little guy (a cobra!) just chillin' out behind the research department. I never thought I'd be like, "Oh a non-poisonous snake? No big deal," and keep walking, but that's what's happening. I can TELL some of the non-poisonous snakes apart now, which is nuts to me! Also, the policy on snakes here is wonderful. Even if poisonous, they're never killed, just caught and released far outside of the grounds. If non-poisonous, people just kind of leave them be. It's nice because so many snakes are killed in India normally that some species are getting very sparse.

This Sunday, we're going to an ancient temple about 50 km from here, so hopefully more cool pictures to come!

Welcome to SEARCH

Hello from India! I didn't officially announce any hiatus, because I would really like to keep a bit of a travel blog while I'm here, but as I was warned, the internet is sporadic and slow and I am really ridiculously busy. The part of India I'm in is called Gadchiroli, which is a very small and poor district of the state of Maharashtra. I'm doing a research internship at a community-health focused NGO called SEARCH, which I think I may have mentioned before. A large part of my project involves reading research papers, so instead, I'm going to focus on the other adventures I (and the other interns) have been having!

We have Sundays off, so two of the other interns and I decided to explore the grounds of the facility for the afternoon! We climbed trees and ate chikoo (an Indian fruit) and ripe tamarind right off the trees and saw a chameleon! Though, to be fair, chameleons haven't been the most interesting thing I've seen here so far. There was a baby cobra just outside our guesthouse a few nights ago! And I've seen 3 snakes in the 5 days I've been here!

A major part of what this organization does is help treat newborns in rural communities by training and empowering local women to make observations about and provide care for newborns in extremely poor, rural communities. Their original field trial of this home-based neonatal care system brought the neonatal mortality rate in this area down by almost 50%! Vandana-tai (pictured) is one such village health worker.

SUPER SPICY peppers drying on the roof of a shanty-house in one of the villages. Another intern took this picture, but I thought it was artsy and cool, haha.

A major factor in starting SEARCH was this broken bridge. A mother with a sick child were trying to get to the doctor who started the organization's (Dr. Abhay Bang) clinic, but couldn't cross the river because the bridge was broken and the river was flooded. They waited till later in the night when the water had gone down a little bit, came to his house and he tried to treat the child in his own bed, but unfortunately the child didn't make it. This experience pushed him to think about how healthcare could be effectively disseminated without having to make arduous journeys to the few hospitals in the area, and thus, this organization was born.

And so naturally, we decided to jump and climb on the ruins like the young children we all are. They looked so much like some crazy ancient ruins! It was immense fun!

A Balboa Park Story

I have been on a half-successful mission this summer to explore more of the city around me. One of the things I did a couple weekends ago was visit the famous and wonderful Balboa Park in San Diego. It's a sprawling park with a number of open amphitheaters, gardens, museums, and other things to amuse you. Seriously, I spent almost six hours there and I feel like I barely made a dent in the place. And it was a beautiful, sunny day, so that didn't really hurt either.

This is the enormous amphitheater where they have free organ concerts on weekends. I have never been here when there hasn't been a wedding party taking pictures all over the place.

There are street artists, magicians, musicians, etc. everywhere that are really good! I saw a high school kid do the most hilarious magic show I've ever seen. So good that I even felt the urge to come out of my Scrooge-y shell and give him a couple bucks at the end. Three guesses why I took this picture, though.

Lilly pond! Enough said! There were koi fish in there too.

They have this really cool exotic garden, and I wanted to include like half the plants I saw there, but seriously, I didn't want to bore you all with pictures of weird trees, so I stuck with this one, which is pretty sweet, right? "Snail" begonias! What I would give to have some of those growing in my yard.

The lovely obligatory fountain! I was probably the only person to manage getting a picture of this thing that didn't have kids running around in it, because let me tell you, those kids were having a right good time playing in this fountain, and it was all I could do not to join them myself.

All-in-all, it was a really fun day! And on my meager budget, it was perfect. I hope to have more adventures like it! Whimsic Alley, I'm talking to you.

The Slopes

In the last few days, the cold weather's got me day dreaming about skiing. Being a Phoenician, seeing snow was rare. Well, in Phoenix, it was non-existent, but you know, occasionally we went places where it snowed. My earliest memory of skiing is going to Eldora resort in Aspen, Colorado when I was 7. I'd played in snow before, but there was something really beautiful about seeing a huge mountain top covered in a blanket of pure white, untouched powder. And then, I got to fly down the mountain at break-neck speed (read: pizza-position it down the bunny slope) and I was hooked. Since then, my family's gone skiing almost every year, and as winter comes closer, I start fantasizing about the next time I'll find myself blazing down a blue diamond (which, I can actually do now!).


Snoqualmie, Seattle.
Yeah, I took this on the ski lift at significant risk to my life.
It's so serene to get up at this obscenely early hour and go to a place where it's peaceful and cold and you're all bundled up. I love feeling chilly wind in my hair and on my face (well, until my nose feels like it's going to fall off from frostbite). This ski season, I want to plan a trip with some of my friends and maybe learn to snowboard. It'll be a lot of planning work, but I think it will, as always, be worth it.


Wizarding Wisdom: 8 DAYS!!
"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." -Arthur Weasley

A New Day

The world looks really awesome through darkly red-tinted sunglasses. I bought these recently, because, as usual, I had lost my old pair within 6 months of having purchased it. Usually, I dislike such a dark tint, but my contact-laden eyes have gotten more light-sensitive since the Accutane, so I went for them. It's a beautiful sunny San Diego day and every thing I've looked at while walking has looked way more awesome than usual. It's full-out Photoshop tint madness! The trees with the red leaves (whose name I tried to find but was unsuccessful) look like there are flaming embers at the tip of each leaf. I realize I sound like I might be high, but this is really very cool. And it is my sense of wonder at the world that now has me skipping class to sit on a pretty little hill and read.
It's a really good thing today is gorgeous, because otherwise I would be monumentally depressed.

I am an incredibly avid fan of the Phoenix Suns, having grown up there and begun my venture into basketball watching just before Amar'e Stoudemire was selected straight out of high school to the Suns in 2002. They had a pretty good thing going then with Stephon Marbury, Shawn Marion and Amar'e making for a strong offense, but overall the team lacked a unifying driving force. The heart was missing. Then, in 2004, Steve Nash was traded to Phoenix from Dallas and everything changed. That season, the Suns had the best record in the league, but fell to the San Antonio Spurs in the conference finals, beginning one of the most intense rivalries in the league. I cried when they lost. Now, this year, with a bit of a different, but very strong, team, we finally beat them (swept 4-0!) and now we're facing another of our most challenging rivals, the infamous Lakers. Watch the clip. In the last second of last night's game, my heart just completely broke.